Alphabet, Google's parent company, is "aggressively pursuing" a hugely lucrative cloud computing contract with the Pentagon, the New York Times reported, citing several anonymous sources. Specifically, it is seeking to compete for bringing the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability into existence – a technology that uses cloud computing and artificial intelligence which the Pentagon hopes will give it the upper hand on the battlefield.
According to the newspaper, Alphabet has given its attempts to secure a share of the contract - more than one tech company is expected to work on the project - a "code yellow" priority, drawing the company's engineers from other projects to develop a proposal for the Pentagon. Alphabet's officials have reportedly already met representatives from the US Air Force and other Pentagon top brass to discuss the bid.
It is unclear, however, whether the Pentagon will agree to entertain Alphabet's bid to be one of the companies to work on the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability; three years ago Alphabet ditched a contract to build AI for US drones, having been forced to take this step after a mass revolt among its employees, who opposed the idea of AI which they had developed being used in machines that could kill civilians.
Alphabet caved in to their demands and created guidelines limiting the sale of its AI technology. It is unclear, however, whether the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability pushes the boundaries of these guidelines. Furthermore, it is uncertain whether Alphabet will be able to ensure the AI and cloud computing it provides for the Pentagon are not used to kill people, since the company's access will be severely limited for security reasons. The New York Times cited an anonymous source as saying that some Google workers believed the project did not violate the company's humanitarian guidelines.
JEDI 2.0?
The idea of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability came about in 2021 after the Pentagon decided to scrap the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), another cloud computing project, which Microsoft was supposed to develop and build. The Department of Defense faced lawsuits from Amazon - Microsoft's key cloud market rival - which lost the bid to build JEDI.
Amazon claimed that the contract was illegally awarded to Microsoft and alleged that the choice had been made after lobbying by Trump. The latter slammed the company's owner Jeff Bezos because the Wall Street Journal - which Bezos owns - had published critical articles about the former president while he was in the White House.
As the Pentagon announced the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, it claimed that because of a significant lag in awarding JEDI, the project - which was expected to cost $10 billion over 10 years - became outdated and needed an upgrade. The Department of Defense said that the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability will need even greater proficiency and experience from the companies making it and thus the list of candidates will be selected by the Pentagon itself. Apart from naming Microsoft and Amazon, the Pentagon pointed at Alphabet, Oracle and IBM as potential candidates.